The Chinese Lunar
New Year period is a joyous occasion but The Police's concert in Macau
on New Year's Day served as a pointer to what can happen when $ingapore's
integrated resorts (high falutin' name for casinos) open for business
in 2009.

In December 2007,
a 38-year-old Mainland Chinese man admitted to Macau police that he had
murdered a 39-year-old Mainland woman at the Venetian Macau as he was
unable to repay a US$25,000 (200,000 Pataca) loan. A police spokesman
said the victim came to Macau as a tourist and stayed at the Venetian
alone on the Cotai Strip. She met the suspect in a Macau casino where
she acted as a middle-person and arranged a US$25,000 (200,000 Pataca)
loan for the borrower. The suspect, a frequent gambler travelling from
the Mainland, lost the lump sum in the casino and failed to repay the
loan to the woman. The man then set fire to the mattress where the womans
body was lying on in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

Earlier in December,
three tour leaders and two tourists from the Mainland were charged with
causing bodily harm after a group of 120 Mainland tourists in Macau turned
against their tour operators. The tourists were reportedly upset with
the number of stores they were forced to visit and the operators' insistence
that they purchase goods. Tour operators often work without a salary and
only earn commission on goods tourists purchase from designated shops
during their trip.

Putting aside this
grim backdrop, The Police concert was more or less business as usual and,
thanks to joffa64, who shared this very good audience recording on the
Dime
site, here's another reasonable way of experiencing the concert.

Joffa64 noted: "The
show was on Chinese New Year's Day, thus the title, which is the standard
New Year greeting (in Cantonese) and means something like "Wishing you
prosperity and wealth". You'll hear Sting say this after Synch2, and he
also says "xin lian kuai le" (Happy New Year, in Mandarin). He
also refers to it being New Year's Eve several times during the show,
despite the fact it's actually New Year's Day. No surprises with the setlist
unfortunately, if anything it seems to be getting shorter."

Another music fan,
loucap81, was more pointed: "I could even live with the same setlist over
and over if it were a longer show. Would it really have killed them to
leave Spirits In The Material World and Murder By Numbers in the setlist
like they were playing at the start of the tour? Did they have to take
out The Bed's Too Big Without You? Why not do BOTH Bed's and Hole in My
Life? And why no more Truth Hits Everybody? If they didn't like how the
song sounded, then do another song in its place. Don't just remove it
and make the show five minutes shorter. To not even do a two-hour show
for people paying that kind of cash is incredibly lame.

"I hate to break
it to you, but they didn't do this tour out of the goodness of their hearts.
I'm OK with cash grab as long as they at least give the fans their money's
worth. In my opinion, having seen four shows (with a ticket to the postponed
Philly 11/14/07 show as well as they hold my cash hostage), this is not
giving the fans their money's worth...

"I just noticed that
Walking In Your Footsteps was cut. So that means that these people got
two less songs than what turned out to be the normal setlist, and four
less songs than what the people in Vancouver got."

Click on
the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (these are high quality, mono
MP3s - sample rate of 192 kibit/s). As far as we can ascertain, this recording
has never been officially released.